![]() In 1967, the United Nations prepared a treaty for the peaceful use of space. Great question! I’ll take them in reverse order. What implications does this have for the future? Is there an international effort to prevent space from becoming the battlefield of the future? In June, President Trump directed the Pentagon to create “ a space force” as the sixth military branch. He told the Doge, “You can identify whether the ship is friend or foe ten times farther away than you can with an unaided eye.” So, the telescope’s value to reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering was immediate! And it’s been used in similar ways ever since. He showed it to the Doge of Venice, and they went up into the high clock tower and looked down onto the lagoon. Galileo, who perfected the telescope in 1609, wanted to look at the sky, but that was not the first thing he did with it. And the only way you could do that was with an understanding of the sun, moon, and stars. If you wanted to know what was on the other side of the ocean, or if you wanted to dominate it, you needed to navigate your way there. This shared technology of methods and tools has been going on since the beginning of nations. Shared by both space scientists and space warriors, it’s a laboratory for one and a battlefield for the other.” Unpack that idea for us, with some examples. You write, “The universe is both the ultimate frontier and the highest of high grounds. Speaking from his publisher’s office in New York, Tyson explained how the first use of Galileo’s telescope was military, how GPS determined the outcome of the Second Gulf War, and why, despite his anti-war views, he regards the collaboration between the military and science as a two-way street. In his new book, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military, Tyson and writer-researcher Avis Lang chart the long but often hidden collaboration between “sky watchers” and the military, from the invention of the telescope to GPS. The host of National Geographic Channel’s StarTalk, director of the Hayden Planetarium and ubiquitous media star, he has helped bring the mysteries of space science into our living rooms. The problem was known as chromatic aberration.Neil deGrasse Tyson hardly needs an introduction. No matter how big the telescope got or how well the lens was made, these bands of color always appeared and distorted the images. Second, bands of color, like a rainbow, appeared at the edges of an image made by a telescope. First, imperfections in the lens could make images appear fuzzy, like looking at an object at the bottom of a pool. These telescopes, known as refractors, were made with larger and better lenses over time, but there were two problems that just wouldn’t go away. All of these things were complete surprises. Galileo also described four moons he discovered orbiting around Jupiter and reported the fact that Venus showed phases, an observation that revolutionized and finally ended the discussion about an Earth-centered Universe. He looked at the Milky Way and saw that the milky appearance was actually due to myriad separate stars that could not be resolved by the human eye. The book included descriptions of mountains and craters Galileo saw on the Moon. ![]() Rare Books Collection, apf6-01298, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library He would not have been able to reach this conclusion without the aid of a telescope.Ĭredit: Galilei, Galileo. He thereby realized that the entire surface of the Moon was pitted with craters and mountains. These depictions emphasize his realization that walls of deep craters on the Moon cast shadows. The treatise included observations Galileo made with his telescope. Illustration of the Moon’s Craters from Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius: Galileo Galilei published Sidereus nuncius, Starry Messenger, in 1610. ![]()
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